Slack channels are free

“Should we create a new Slack channel for this?”

I’ve not seen a topic as divisive as this since the days of tabs vs spaces (tl;dr: use tabs). Whenever there’s a suggestion to create a new channel, there are fervent discussions about why it’s a good/bad idea, with strong feelings on both sides.

I’m firmly in camp “as many channels as needed, sometimes more channels than employees”. Once you hit a certain size, having a few firehose channels for everything means that 80%+ of the messages in a channel are irrelevant to the majority of the audience.

Instead, spin up a new channel for each area of focus. This allows you to keep your working groups small (12 rather than 1200 people) and lets people focus on the channels that are important day to day.

Extra credit: If you really want to help people focus, ensure that you use threads to prevent unread notifications. If you see a topic that you want to follow, click the “get notified about new replies” option in the context menu for the top level message.

The Power of Focused Channels

Using specific channels for each topic has immediate benefits. Scoping conversations down to a topic rather than it being a free for all provides consumers with:

1. Notification control
2. Easier searching
3. Single purpose channels (e.g. discussion, alerts etc)
4. The correct audience

Even Slack recommends using more, topic specific channels:

When you set up multiple topic- and project-specific channels, groups can focus their discussions among smaller numbers of people, helping them to align and move faster. And having lots of specific channels means that each person can participate in fewer channels, because only a handful of them will be necessary for their daily work.
 
via https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/resources/using-slack/how-to-organize-your-slack-channels

Fewer Unnecessary Notifications

Being able to manage notifications is my favourite reason to use more Slack channels. Not all messages are created equally, but when they land in the same channel I have to manually read and filter the messages in my head.

For concrete example, imagine a company that has a single #general channel. It’s a place where company updates are shared, but also a place where people chat about the weekend. As a consumer I have to follow the channel in case I miss anything but the signal to noise ratio is low.

Now imagine that this channel is split in to #announcements and #watercooler. I can safely mute or leave the water cooler channel while paying close attention to #announcements.

Find What You Need—Fast

Once you have separate channels, searching becomes much easier. All you need is a keyword or two and the channel that you recall seeing the conversation in.

When working on some new documentation, I searched in the #support channel for “flubjam”, the name of the product I was working on (no, thats not the real product name). This surfaced all the issues customers were having with the product that I can now weave in to the updated documentation.

Dedicated Channels, Better Workflows

If we take the notification control benefit and supercharge it, we get to “single use channels”. Slack can do so much more than be a chat room for your team.

A large portion of my Slack usage is monitoring events:

• A new post on Stack Overflow with a specific tag goes to #stack-overflow
• New GitHub issues and releases for the flubjam project are piped in to #notify-flubjam
• All GitHub activity for the flubjam project is piped in to #firehose-flubjam
• Posts elsewhere on Slack that get a floppy disk icon are cross posted to #zmeta-saved

Creating single use channels gives people the information that they need, when they need it.

Reach the Right People, Every Time

Finally, using single purpose channels means that your audience is probably the one you’re looking for. Instead of blasting your question to 1200 people in a general channel, you can ask a targeted group your specific question.

I find this much easier than trying to figure out who’s involved in a project to set up a five way DM (which will inevitably miss out a key person who then feels slighted that I forgot them).

Finding the Right Channels

So if focused channels are so great, why don’t we all do it? There’s an easy answer:

Finding new channels is hard.

There are a couple of ways to solve this problem. The most effective ones I’ve seen are:

• Have a channel that announces new channels (very meta!)
• Set a reminder to check for new channels weekly using the Channels->Browse Channels option. Usually there haven’t been that many created in the last 7 days.
• You can rely on people to invite you. Usually they won’t invite you directly. Instead, they’ll mention you by your Slack username, realise that you’re not there and then click “invite”. This means you only join channels when there is something for you to actively participate in
• Finally, update your onboarding documentation with links to relevant channels (you do have onboarding documentation, right? 😁)

Where Should You Post?

Ok, so you have lots of tightly scoped channels. You’ve joined the channels relevant to your day to day work, and now you have a question about the “flubjam” project.

Do you post in #team-product, #flubjam-is-cool or #general?

Channel naming schemes can help with this. One of the patterns I’ve seen at a few different places now is to have an “#ask-team-name” channel that is public. Have a question for finance? #ask-finance! Curious about the product roadmap? #ask-product!

If you’re small enough that you have 1-3 products, keeping a single #ask-product channel makes sense.

As you expand your product offering, you may want to expand to “#ask-product-name” style channels, such as “#ask-dev-portal”. This allows the product triad to answer the questions as a team rather than the questions going to a specific department all the time.

Finally, each product is made up of various initiatives and deliverables. You likely have a “#private-team-a” channel that you use to discuss ongoing projects, but I encourage you to bring that conversation in to “#project-name” channels. Not only does it give you a single place to read for any given project, it invites collaboration with other teams who may have suggestions based on their experience. These channels are short lived and should be archived as soon as the project is completed.

To recap:

• #ask-team-name to get started
• #ask-product-name as the team grows
• #project-name to stop conversation sprawl and build a culture of collaboration

With concrete examples:

• #ask-product for general product questions
• #ask-flubjam for all flubjam related questions
• #project-flubjam-capacitors is a short term channel to talk about implementing capacitors in flubjam

Create That Slack Channel

Focused channels improve notification control, make searching easier, ensure the right audience sees your messages, and unlock powerful workflows beyond just chat. While discoverability can be a challenge, a few simple strategies—like clear naming conventions—can make it easy for people to find the right spaces.

At the end of the day, good Slack hygiene isn’t about having fewer channels—it’s about having the right channels.

Update: Super Bonus Content

I shared a preview of this post with some colleagues and Jason had some great feedback on how to cope with channel sprawl:

• Housecleaning built-in: If you have a topic that is not meant to be long-lived, a convention that flags the channel (usually #temp-) signifies that when the topic is resolved, the channel dies. This helps address the channel sprawl problem, and intentionally redirects folks back to long-lived comms channels, vs tactical problem solving.
• Join many, star few: the likelihood that you keep up with the conversation in every channel you join, in a "Slack channels are free" environment, is pretty much zero. Missing critical notifications on people you are working with regularly is a big risk to productivity, and job security in some cases. Star key channels, and mark your closest collaborators and reporting chain as "VIP", so they are on a short-list to focus your attention.
• Ruthless prioritization on "Leave Channel": if you're not contributing or engaging in a channel, leave it immediately. If you're mentioned, you'll be notified, and you can rejoin.

As someone that left 175 Slack channels in his January cleanup, that last point on ruthless priorization is key. I'm already back in some of them, but I know it's because I'm actively engaged rather than through inertia.